How could we forget The Spoon?!
Thor’s title was The Mighty Thor, but nobody would call him “The Thor” because frankly it’s just really hard to say.
Case in point, The Smashing Pumpkins. They intentionally have “the” in their name to assure people that the word “smashing” is an adjective, not a verb. (They aren’t smashing pumpkins, like vandals on Halloween, they are “smashing” in the British vernacular.)
Incidentally, The Smashing Pumpkins may not signify what you have in mind. It’s not the image of a pumpkin lying crushed in pieces on the ground, goo spattered everywhere. According to a TikTok video that they uploaded this year, the word “Smashing” acts as an adjective rather than a verb. Thus, the name gives way to an excellent or wonderful-looking pumpkin, not a squashed broken one.
One of your examples doesn’t hold true.
If you look inside an issue, say #14, you’ll see that The Justice Society were definitely called The.
As an aside, look at the roster on your image. The Flash. The Green Lantern. The Spectre. The Hawkman. The Hour Man. The Sandman. The Atom. Few of them had their own comic books then, so their titles of comics can’t be defining.
DC makes it hard to view images online, but I remember that their modern version also always referred to them as The, although that wasn’t the official title of the comic. Click on the image of the cover of the first issue and Despero thinks of them as The Justice League.
They don’t always use the “the”.
Don’t forget about The Flaming Carrot.
Of course, plenty of villians get the The treatment as well;
- The Joker
- The Riddler
- The Penguin
- The Kingpin
- The Devastator
- The Ultra-Humanite
- The Violator
- The Iron Monger
- The Mandarin
- The Green Goblin (and his alter-ego, the Iron Patriot)
- The Juggernaut (bitch)
- The Batman Who Laughs
And because Thor is, like, his actual name as an individual. Like The Amazing Kreskin is not addressed as The Kreskin.
Also along the lines of “it’s awkward to say” would be The Invincible Iron Man who becomes just referred to as Iron Man in everyday use.
All of the various characters around the “The” supers of course drop the “the” in casual conversation. The Batman is an interesting case in that he more often concatenated to just “Batman” and a huge part of the public takes that as the default. Meanwhile his primary sidekick has AFAIK never been The Robin, but just Robin.
But it’s never The Catwoman, is it?
Nor is it Poison Ivy, Two-Face, or Bane.
Catwoman gets various treatment depending on context. The cover story of Detective Comics #203, Jan. 1954, is “The Crimes of the Catwoman.” Selina Kyle has reformed, but when a newspaper digs up her old adventures under the headline “The Conquest of the Catwoman” she decided to get back in the game.
When she is addressed directly, she is plain Catwoman. But when she is referred to, its the Catwoman, as in “the Catwoman is on the prowl again” and “only time will tell about the Catwoman!”
Her official name is certainly just Catwoman, though, because it’s put into bold type, just like Batman and Robin. The “the” is never bolded.
Another anecdote I just remembered, in the cartoon Teen Titans Go, the protagonists decided to become villains and slightly changed their names and looks.
Cyborg added some spikes and became “The Cyborg”.
Then there’s Ace the Bat-Hound…
WAG; a billowing cape also makes flying scenes more visually dynamic.
Because somebody had to:
Didn’t Kara say something about capes lending flight stability sometime during the first season of Supergirl?
Almost no “super” heroes could fly back in the 1940s. Even Superman jumped until the radio show started him flying because they liked the whoosh sound effect.
I think we overestimate how many characters wore capes because we mostly remember only Superman and Batman. I would guess that less than a quarter of supers wore capes. Maybe a tenth. Unless the scene put the character against a swooping background, capes just got in the way in fight scenes. I just found an episode of The Hangman, a JSA member mentioned above. In almost every panel, he is depicted on his own. Finally he gets into a fight. And his cape literally disappears for a panel.
Most of the other caped characters I looked at wore very short capes, like butt-length. For fight scenes the artists always drew them stiff to indicate that motion propelled them away from the body, so that they stuck out from their bodies at almost a right angle to the neck and are shorter than they were when the character just stands as they would take up the whole panel otherwise. The effect looks very silly today, but were necessary. Capes were mostly a nuisance.
Dyna-Guy sounds similar to the real 1940s Dynamic Man, who was one of the few who did really wear a cape.
Well, now we also have to acknowledge Namor the Sub-Mariner, Ego the Living Planet, Ronan the Accuser, Conan the Barbarian, Comet the Super Horse, and all manner of other Name the Adjectives. Down this road lies madness.
And Green Lantern!
But yes, most Golden Age superheroes didn’t wear capes. Wonder Woman, Captain America, the Sub-Mariner, the Human Torch (the original android, not Johnny Storm), and so on. Captain Marvel wore a cape, but it was a tiny thing that barely covered his butt and could only go over one shoulder at a time. It’s hard to find many legendary superheroes of that era who wore one. Maybe Dr. Fate counts, but he’s still fairly obscure (certainly not a household name).